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Elementary Science

SPED Science

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Regina Rios Regina Rios 390 Points

Hello my name is Regina Rios and I am currently a student at UTRGV. My major is education for special ed students. Since I will be teaching all subjects at an elementary level, I was wondering how can I help my sped students in order for me to deliver a science lesson? What kind of hands on activities can I do? or what accomedations would be recomendable?

Matt Bobrowsky Matt Bobrowsky 6410 Points

Have you looked at the Phenomenon-Based Learning (PBL) activities in NSTA's 'Gadgets and Gizmos' books?  Here is a link to the elementary version:
http://www.nsta.org/store/product_detail.aspx?id=10.2505/9781936959389
The PBL approach will work great with sped students.

Richard Lahti Richard Lahti 3100 Points

In some ways, accommodations are the wrong way to think about things and very outdated. The notion of accommodations starts with the idea that you are teaching in a very elitist, ableist, racist, and/or sexist manner and then need to make intentional changes to make it suck less for everyone else.
Read up on inquiry (5E learning cycle, etc. There are a number of great collections in NSTA learning center on this)- there is plenty of lit suggesting that this approach can be better of just about any group you name, from SPED to ELL to minorities to girls because:
1. It builds from direct experiences first (so you are not relying on whether or not your students have lived a life where they have experienced something which might privilege one group over another) you start by giving them the direct experience in the Explore phase.
2. It is socially constructed - i.e. the students talk it out in groups, trying to Explain what they are observing, looking for patterns, etc. By not requiring a heavy read/write load, you are already leveling the playing field for many students, and many minority cultures have verbal traditions rather than formal written traditions. Depending on your setting, homogeneous groups may or may not make sense (perhaps an ELL group that has the freedom to explore and communicate in their native language together first, to grasp the concept, then explain in English at the end ... etc. There is plenty of lit on this and homogeneous groups allows you to give just that group an accommodation if needed. Or you can subtly differentiate by the facet of the task that group approaches. For example, I do an activity on climate (middle school) where they get data on a number of cities, but it just starts with a map and temp/precip graphs. The weaker groups might not hardly get past the role that latitude plays. The stronger groups say things like 'It seems that sometimes being near the cost matters, is there something going on with the winds (or ocean currents)' and then they are given maps of prevailing winds (or ocean currents) just-in-time. Anyway, since they are not being graded on the number of patterns they find and all of this is shared out at the next level, call on the weaker group first so they can contribute the little bit they were able to accomplish and feel part of it.
3. If you do the Engage phase right, you trigger intrinsic motivation, and getting the students interested is 1/2 the battle. Get them an authentic task/problem and/or something like local flavor.

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